Unreal Engine Blueprint - Experimental Actor Animation Baker
Project files are available as a Tier 3 reward: https://www.patreon.com/GhislainGir
Hi, here's an experimental tool that lets you bake a keyframed location/rotation animation of multiple actors (authored in engine using a level sequence) into a single mesh that reads a small texture for very efficient animation rendering. This may prove very useful for animated environment props.
Demo/Breakdown of the system
Demo
Blueprint is highly documented making it a great educational project as well
Core idea relies on this plugin that lets you sample a level sequence and access its animation data
Material function used to play back the baked animation. It's three texture sampler but it's one pixel after the other so it should be GPU cache friendly. Maths is really simple despite allowing smooth location/rotation anim (no scale yet)
Bake pixel per pixel the animation data
Texture produced by the tool is extremely small and light weight. It contains all animation data of a specific row in three row of pixels (abc)